broken thumb drive

Hello. I am helping a teacher out with her thumb drive. She lost all her data that was on it. I thought no problem, i should be able to get most of it off using a program. But osx wont even recognize it, and in windows, it comes up but when i click it in my computer it says "insert disk into drive g". So what else could i do to try and save some of her data? I can't even format it, just so she could save the thumb drive..

Staff Member

Do you see any hint of it in Disk Utility when it's connected to a Mac? It should show up as a device with no volumes on it... If so, you could try to make a bit-for-bit image of the device using dd from Terminal and go looking for what might still be there in the image.

I just went through this for an SD card which got confused and hid all of the photos my wife had taken that day, not quite as bad as losing the f.s. but close...

Staff Member

FWIW as part of the recovery I mentioned above, I bought http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/ which did work very well for the JPEGs on the SD card, but not well at all for the MOVs. I ended up recovering those manually using the image and a hex editor.

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